Monthly Archives: February 2013

There are hundreds if not thousands of WordPress theme shops out there. Many are blow-your-socks-off amazing. Conversely, many are just throwing themes against the wall and seeing if they stick.

Rather than just list all of the well-known, popular WordPress theme providers, I decided to identify some of the more obscure theme shops. The following are high quality, lesser-known WordPress theme shops you may never have heard of. Go ahead, try them out. This post has no affiliate links.

Lots of high quality themes with an elegant, minimalist style throughout their portfolio. Like the big boys, ThemeShift will soon be releasing their own theme framework upon which to build their future themes.

Beautiful, minimalist designs pulled off with a classy and professional look. In this case, minimalist does NOT mean boring. This provider was once featured on SmashingMagazine.com, but still remains under the radar.

WordPress.com has recently added a new vertical specifically aimed at the education sector called WordPress Classrooms. Many teachers will tell you that they have been using WordPress for some time for class blogs and for communicating with parents, however, this vertical includes some features that will make life much easier for teachers and students.

Privacy

Privacy is the number one factor for teachers looking at getting their content on the web. Particularly if the content includes photos or videos of kids. WordPress for Classrooms deals with this by giving users a range of privacy options, including keeping content from search engines, password protecting posts, or simply limiting posts to certain logged in users.

Themes

WordPress.com users can select from a list of predetermined themes, however, classroom users get access to a wider range of Education specific themes. Any user, can of course pay a small fee to use a custom theme. With the launch of Classrooms, WordPress have also released a new theme called Chalkboard, that would make a great template for a class blog. Check it out here.

With an emphasis on BYOD that many schools in developed countries seem to be moving towards, it makes a lot of sense for teachers to use blogs more often. If a student is sitting with an iPad or laptop on their desk, then blogging to WordPress will be a breeze. This is a great opportunity for teachers to give WordPress a try.

WordPress for classrooms also includes all the great features that other .Com users get, which make it an ideal classroom website option: Moderated and threaded comments, great media embedding options, simplicity and speed of publishing and all this is hosted in free package. Sounds like a winner to us. With an emphasis on BYOD that many schools in developed countries seem to be moving towards, it makes a lot of sense for teachers to use blogs more often. If a student is sitting with an iPad or laptop on their desk, then blogging to WordPress will be a breeze. This is a great opportunity for teachers to give WordPress a try. If you are involved in Education and want to check it out, jump over to WordPress.com Classrooms.

What to consider when choosing a WordPress theme for a nonprofit.

Today’s nonprofit can no longer depend on generous donors to send money because of the quality or depth of the mission. In a tight economy, nonprofits need to act like businesses – adopting business principles and strategy in order to stay competitive. One major component of a competitive nonprofit is a powerful and dynamic web presence.

Because this new reality for nonprofits and non-governmental organizations requires an intentional focus on their website and design, and WordPress is miles above the competition when it comes to building a community online, I thought it important to look at what makes a good nonprofit WordPress theme.

First, how these themes were rated.

1) A good nonprofit WordPress theme must be easy to navigate for non-tech savvy visitors.

I examined each of these three factors, along with basic standards for usability, good design principles and quality coding. The following are standout themes that would be good for virtually any nonprofit.

Responsive is the key phrase here. With more people accessing the web via mobile devices than ever before, this theme will set up your organization to catch people wherever they are, and in the future as more and more people use mobile web.

One of the very few themes out there specifically designed for nonprofits. Foundation theme is from a small (2-theme) shop so who knows about support or consistency. But the theme looks pretty tight and clean.

Generating lots of written content? This theme is the one for your group. A very clean, professional look with sutle vertical lines make the user feel like they’re sitting in grandma’s living room (in a good way).

Yep, I really dig the simple themes. Most themes today only look good with amazing, popping images and we don’t all have those accessible and appropriate for our site. Simplo is super simple and super easy to navigate. Two great design principles.

This one is modern in terms of design style. The static image background, overlaying screening, and round social buttons are all “design-forward”. If your nonprofit is progressive, this may be the design for you.

Rounding out my list of favorites among favorites, tint has a cool, retro color bar at the top that serves no function other than to make me happy. The user is drawn to the content of your message or mission right away.

Not my favorite design, can’t really explain why. But it has all the right components. Maybe it’s my hatred of the color teal. Yes, that’s it. Otherwise, Quintel might work perfectly for your nonprofit.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress has released an update to the WordPress iOS app: version 3.4. It now supports push notifications for events such as comments, likes, shares, new posts, and more. This feature should be great for keeping your comment moderation time down, and giving your blog a current/live feeling, as you will be able to approve comments in real time when using your phone. To gain access to the push notification feature on a self-hosted WordPress.org blog you will need to add the jetpack plugin.

Comment moderation has been greatly improved in this update also, allowing users to carry out all moderation tasks from one screen. This is a significant feature for user friendliness, and something I have been waiting for, for a long time, mostly because this is the type of task I think a phone or tablet is more useful for. It’s not likely that I will be writing entire posts on my iPhone, however, moderating comments when I have a free moment of two makes a lot of sense. So I am very pleased with this new feature.

The app is still missing a few key features. Most notability the option to search through old posts, thus allowing you to make quick edits or updates to existing posts.

Some of the reviews on iTunes are suggestion the new version is fairly unstable. What do you think of the new version?